I'm managing director of Strategic Communications for FTI Consulting, based in Houston. Prior to joining FTI in 2012, I had a 33 year career in the oil and gas industry, working public policy issues for a number of companies including Shell, Burlington Resources, El Paso Corp., and Coastal States. I've also led numerous industry-wide efforts to address regulatory and legislative issues at the local, state and federal level. From April 2010 through June 2012, David served as the Texas State Lead for America’s Natural Gas Alliance. I attended Texas A&I University and The University of Texas, earning B.A. in accounting.

Horizontal Drilling: A Technological Marvel Ignored

We often hear spokespeople for the oil and natural gas industry talk about how the massive new shale gas and oil resources discovered in recent years were made possible by the wedding of two technologies: Hydraulic Fracturing (“Fracking” in media parlance) and Horizontal Drilling. Once that statement is made, the conversation with news reporters, at townhall meetings and in public speaking engagements then quickly focuses on the “Fracking” part of the equation, leaving Horizontal Drilling to sit largely ignored and unappreciated by the media and the public at large.

This is a shame, because the truth is that, of the two technologies, Horizontal Drilling is the real marvel of engineering and scientific innovation. While impressive in its own right, the main innovations in “Fracking” in recent years have been beefing up the generating horsepower to accommodate horizontal wells rather than vertical ones, and refining of the fluids used to conserve water and create better, longer lasting fractures in the target formation.

This is all great stuff, and all necessary to create our ongoing shale boom, but the real marvel is the innovation that has take place in the realm of Horizontal Drilling. Think about what this advancement has meant just in terms of access to the resources: When drilling into a hydrocarbon bearing formation 100 feet thick, vertical drilling would allow an operator to contact 100 feet of rock, which would limit your potential recovery to whatever oil or gas would flow into that length of pipe.

Horizontal Drilling now allows these same operators to drill and set pipe for a mile or more horizontally through this same rock formation. You are now contacting and “Fracking” 5,200 feet of rock rather than 100 feet, which multiplies expected well recovery rates many times over. The technology employed is so advanced and exacting that drillers today can hit a target at the end of a drill string that is 10,000 feet vertical with a mile long horizontal section that is no more than a few inches in diameter. Drillers also use sensors to detect particularly promising rock intervals within the formation, and are able to move the drill string up or down, left or right as they drill through the horizontal section to target those intervals.

These extraordinary technological achievements enable operators to maximize returns from each well, which in turn means higher royalty payments to mineral owners, and higher tax revenues for local and state taxing authorities.

Advanced horizontal drilling technology also produces positive results for the environment. A single horizontal well can replace the need to drill a dozen or even more vertical wells to access a similar level of resource. For the environment this means far less air emissions, far less water usage and disposal needs, and far less land impacted to produce a similar amount of oil and natural gas.

Add to all of that the fact that the industry’s ability to access natural gas in shale formations, and the supply abundance that has produced, has enabled the conversion of dozens of older coal-fired power plants to cleaner-buring natural gas. That has led directly to the lowering of US greenhouse gas emissions to levels not seen since the early ’90s, a result not matched by any other industrialized nation.

Extraordinary.

So why has such an amazing and beneficial technological innovation been largely ignored by the media and those in the anti-development community? Simple: It’s not controversial, and its name does not lend itself to attract attention in newspaper headlines, as “Fracking” does.

Chris Tucker of EnergyInDepth explained it well in an interview with NPR recently:

“It starts with F, ends in C-K,” he says. “It sort of has this naughty connotation to it.”

Tucker says fracking has been distilled down to a curse word, “and that’s important for press releases and bumper stickers and everything else. Horizontal drilling hasn’t been distilled that way.”

Exactly. ”Fracking” has basically become a cuss word in the American lexicon, and it attracts attention when inserted into a headline or used in a TV or radio news story.

This reality has led to the common practice in the news media of expanding the term “Fracking” to encompass literally any activity that relates to drilling and completing an oil or gas well. It seems that many in the business of reporting on energy-related news have decided that a story about the oil and gas industry just won’t sell without the inclusion of “Fracking”, “Fracked”, ”Frackers” or some other conjugation of this figurative cuss word in the headline. And so we have the growing phenomenon of story after story which have little or nothing to do with Hydraulic Fracturing headlined with the “Frack” word.

The net result of this media and anti-development movement obsession with a virtual cuss word has been that the technological marvel that is Horizontal Drilling has failed to get the attention it really deserves. One supposes that could change at some point, given that the possible “naughty” connotations of “Horizontal Drilling” seem fairly obvious, but we’re not going to go there today.

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